


A World Without God

by Miss_M



Category: Artists RPF, Vincent & Theo (1990)
Genre: Art, Artists, Backstory, Brothers, Character Study, Gen, Mention of M/F, Religion, Tide of History Challenge, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:55:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28098789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M
Summary: The first time Theo truly believed Vincent’s insistence that he would become a painter was when Vincent sent him the drawing of the woman pissing in a chamber pot.
Comments: 11
Kudos: 13
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	A World Without God

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Selena](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Selena/gifts).



> I own nothing.

The first time Theo truly believed Vincent’s insistence that he would become a painter was when Vincent sent him the drawing of the woman pissing in a chamber pot. Before then, Theo had believed in Vincent through sheer inertia: the burdens relinquished by the older brother had fallen on the younger.

Vincent would argue with their father over the dinner table, about theology and society and food. Vincent would insist on the difference between religion and the church, with its rituals and its cold dignity and its stick-up-the-assness, as Vincent called it to make Theo laugh. “It makes no sense that the poor must eat their potatoes without so much as a pinch of salt while we put butter on ours, just because you are of the church and they only come to church on Sundays, if they can manage it,” Vincent would shout. Their father’s thin lips would grow bloodless with anger, and he would send Vincent up to bed without any dinner. When Theo moved away, Vincent wrote that being sent to bed without dinner remained a common occurrence once he was living at home again, after his disappointment in attempting to be a missionary, when he took up the apostolic life in between visiting the cheapest brothels and getting barred from taverns for never settling his account.

Vincent’s way had been to challenge their father’s hypocrisy and insist on what was and what should be: the reality of children going hungry and the words of scripture lying dead yet full of implicit promise on the page. “Like a dried pomegranate,” Theo mused once. “It’s not sweet, you know,” Vincent countered. “A pomegranate. It’s not a sweet fruit. It’s tart as well as sweet. Makes your mouth water, your palate want more.”

Theo’s way had been to suffer through father’s homilies, eat his dinner and watch the smear of melted butter on his plate with something close to hatred twisting in his full stomach, and then go out into the marshy fields on the edge of town and scream till crows and blackbirds rose cawing from the winter fields before him, till he set the dogs in the town behind him to barking.

When Vincent tried and failed to please their parents and then threw away their expectations with a wounded sneer, saying he’d never wanted any of it – though he’d tried to preach and to teach and even to sell paintings, all Van Gogh family traditions, the pillars which propped up their position in society – Theo became the oldest son Theodorus van Gogh and his wife Anna Cornelia should have had. He worked for his uncle, he sold paintings to people with money and no more sense than they had taste, he moved on up and out to The Hague, Brussels, Paris, where he indulged all of his frustrated desires and the guilt their satisfaction brought with it. He kept sending Vincent money, because what kind of a brother would he have been if he’d refused?

“I’m going to be a painter,” Vincent said. “I’m going to do it properly. What do you think of that?”

Theo looked around Vincent’s garret, their mother’s words about cleanliness and godliness, and poverty not being an excuse for a lapse in either echoing in his head. He looked at the table – the tin plate with a dry crust on it, the dirty glass, the candlestick, the charcoal sketches. Buildings, trees, people walking in the street, peasants at the market. All very proper and proportionate. Anyone could have drawn that. “Not much,” Theo said.

They had a fight then, of course, both of their tempers always poking up to the surface and only Theo ever making even a halfhearted effort to rein his in. Yet still he kept sending Vincent money from Paris, as well as boxes of charcoal, reams of the good paper – smooth and white like clotted cream, with a watermark – and later canvas, brushes, tubes and tubes of paint, the kind Theo could afford on his salary. “Don’t send me any turpentine,” Vincent wrote once, though the thought hadn’t crossed Theo’s mind, but Vincent expected his mind to be known without always needing to speak. “If there’s one thing the Dutch know how to do, it’s to strip away beauty and color from things: white walls, white souls, white shrouds.”

It rained the day the postman delivered the sketches – the butcher’s paper in which Vincent had wrapped them was spattered but the sketches were not smeared. Vincent’s letter talked about the woman in them, whose name was Sien and who’d had a hard life. Still had a hard life.

By that point, Theo had seen enough to know what a sham his uncle’s gallery was. He’d seen Corot, Sisley, Seurat: the world of the senses, the world of the mind, the landscapes of the heart, all in one place. The yearning and the rapture Theo had always wanted to feel in church but couldn’t. In comparison, the world in which Theo walked and worked and slept and fucked was a watercolor over which someone had spilled a glass of water.

Vincent’s sketches showed the woman, Sien, as she must have been, but also more: as she could have been, should have been, resolutely was. Her naked body was not idealized, fine lines and shapes drawn by fine brushes, like the women displayed at the Académie. She was lumpy, but she was not a figure of scorn, a fleshly warning. Theo could imagine putting his hands on her hips. Her heaviness enraptured him. He knew just how she would smell: sweat and cabbage and cheap alcohol and black tobacco. The nudes in the paintings Theo sold engaged in all manner of horrors – watched cock fights, instigated the executions of saints, were paraded before old lechers, posed in the kind of tropical landscapes where the sun should have burned their milky skin bright red and tight as a drum – yet remained white and unblemished, innocent and inciting all at once. A public display of sin and lies to decorate the garishly-papered walls of a bourgeois home.

In Vincent’s drawings, Sien walked about, wearing her nudity rather than posing in it. She squatted on the chamber pot, her face turned away, uninterested in being watched, refusing the responsibilities that another’s eyes attempted to foist on her. She scratched her armpit and yawned. Bowed down by her life, she reared back up and rejected the burden of picturesqueness.

“Why does he draw that?” Musette asked. “It’s disgusting.”

“It’s what he sees,” Theo said. It felt like a lie not to mention the rest of it, all that he saw and knew Vincent had intended when he’d made the drawings, but Theo knew better than to talk about art except to try to sell some. He was no artist, no poet, just a man with an eye for the brilliance, the mouth-watering fullness that could be glimpsed sometimes in this world stripped of glory.

Ashamed of his meanness and all his past unkind thoughts about Vincent, he resolved to start sending his brother the best, priciest paints he could find, even if it meant he’d have to live on bread and cheese and cheap wine at month’s end.


End file.
